Happy Fifth Birthday to mozilla.org

Sunday February 23rd, 2003

Five years ago today, Netscape Communications Corporation announced the creation of mozilla.org, with a mission to "promote, foster and guide open dialog and development of Netscape's client source code." Describing the new organization as "a focal point for developers who are interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source," Netscape also announced the launch of the mozilla.org site, designed to "provide a central point of contact and community by encouraging developers to download the client source code, post their enhancements, take part in newsgroup discussions, and obtain and share Communicator-related information with Netscape and others in the Internet community." The Netscape Communicator client source code was released a little over a month later, on Tuesday 31st March 1998.

This seems to be the oldest version that can be accessed at archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/19990116225540/http://mozilla.org/
(other archived versions: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mozilla.org)

The evidence is in the flame throwing geen mozilla. Green dino must be a pyromaniac terrorist. Sshhhh keep it quiet or our brilliant 540 points SAT scoring president might find out and order mozilla's assets confiscated. :-)

I'm not sure if it's enough of an indicator, but the our mozdev project seen quite a few downloads from Saudi Arabia. An undercover terrorist cell perhaps? We have even thought of offering an al-Queda sidebar add-on for improved communication...

Five years I've been rooting for this underdog...and five years later the Windows version *still* has severe and crippling memory leaks. Yes, I like the features and the philosophy. Now if only the *implementation* could become stable and reliable. Please please please....

And I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser for over a year, on Windows, with no significant problems whatsoever in those areas. The browser's been near enough rock solid (certain nightlies excluded) and doesn't seem to use a great deal of memory - certainly nothing 'severe' or 'crippling'. The UI, meanwhile, has gradually improved.

I'm not saying there is absolutely no problem with memory consumption, though; it does sometimes take Mozilla an abnormally long time to swap back into memory after you click on a window having not used it for a while. I'm not entirely sure why as other (larger) programs seem to come up quicker in the same circumstances. But anyway, this might be 'mildly annoying' but it isn't even 'severe' never mind 'crippling', and I don't have a lot of memory - only 256 MB, which is bottom-of-the-line these days.

Well done Mozilla (and all the developers), it did take a bloody long time to get anywhere but we're there now. Even though there's always room for improvement!

from the http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease577.html
"As a follow-on to Netscape’s recent announcement to make the first developer release of Communicator 5.0 source code available for free, mozilla.org will act as a focal point for developers who are interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source"

when developer realized that a complete rewrite of the browser suite was necessary are they any newgroup threads, white papers, ect about that? it would be cool to follow dev discussion about this topic.

There's a lot about this in the Mozillazine archive. Check out these links: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=88 http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=105 http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=171